This week I saw an ad for employment for a "mirror" website. Doesn’t sound very interesting, you might think. But this isn’t just any "mirror" website – it is Germany’s news magazine Der SPIEGEL.

"Spiegel" is the German word for "mirror", and Der SPIEGEL, originally patterned after America’s TIME magazine, does that every week. On their English-language website they advertized for a full-time editor, and part-time editors to help out on a per-diem basis during vacation periods. The latter offer intrigued me, so I wrote them a brief summary of my qualifications: 22 years experience in Germany, fluency in German, etc. One mistake I won’t make for them would be to claim (as one of their reporters did in an article a few years ago) that America’s religiosity – as viewed from Europe – is reflected by the U.S. Navy naming ships for religious terms like "Corpus Christi". The author was obviously unaware that ships are routinely named for places in America, like states, rivers and – guess what – cities, like Corpus Christi, Texas.

Maybe my application for this interesting assignment is a delayed subconscious response to a rejected "letter-to-the-editor" I wrote in the 1980s when Der SPIEGEL publisher Rudolf Augstein missed the date of the Christmas bombardment of Hanoi by 2 years (he wrote in an editorial critical of U.S. policy that it happened in 1970, two years prior to the actual date). In my letter, I had written that someone who wanted to be righteous in his condemnation should at least be right with his facts.

I closed my email application to "Der SPIEGEL" with this remark: "Since I normally don’t do resumes, if you are sincerely interested in my services I will send you one. Otherwise you will find everything you need to get an impression of my qualifications on the websites mentioned above" – which include this blog.